Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, an image processing method, and a storage medium.
Description of the Related Art
Technology for searching for (extracting) a desired image data item from among image data items that have been input is currently known (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-196542). An image search apparatus disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-196542 performs pattern matching processing for each predetermined range of input image data items and, based on the processing result, extracts a specific image data item related to a face image in those image data items.
The computational load of processing for recognizing an object (a person or the like) contained in an image data item (processing for specifying who or what each object is) is relatively high. Thus, in the case where, for example, a user attempts to search for an image data item containing a desired object from among a large number of image data items, there is a possibility that it may take a long time to obtain a search result.
Incidentally, for the user, the importance of objects contained in image data items is not necessarily uniform. For example, when a plurality of image data items are present, the importance of an object contained in a certain image data item may be higher than the importance of that object contained in another image data item. Also, even when only one image data item is present, the importance may vary among a plurality of objects contained in this image data item. However, with conventional technology, object recognition processing is performed without taking the importance of objects into account.